At one-thirty in the afternoon, the campus was already deserted.
Apart from the three lines of footprints steadily advancing through the snow, all traces of human activity had been completely buried beneath the fresh snowfall.
Following the direction of the falling snow, the farther they went, the stronger the sense of desolation became.
In the vast whiteness between heaven and earth, only these three figures remained, trudging forward like specks of dust.
The towering E-2 building stood along the side of the mountain, its shaded side steeped in an excessive gloom.
The grotesque, terrifying corpses on the exterior had already been dealt with beneath their fresh coat of snow.
Yet the twenty-odd ropes hanging in the air still swayed in the wind. The heavy stench of death could never be dispersed; instead, it only grew stronger.
"So, you were questioned by the black-clothed people as well."
Listening to Zhu Xiaoning's account and looking at the increasingly close E-2 building, Ji Li asked softly.
Zhu Xiaoning nodded silently. Following his gaze toward the building they had returned to, she sighed and said,
"I know what Xue Tinghai regrets. We were stopped by black-clothed people on the 13th Floor and questioned.
"That delayed us by at least three minutes. By the time we reached the rooftop, the alarm clock's traces in the snow were still fresh.
"That means that without those three minutes, we might have encountered the person behind it all."
There was some basis for that speculation.
Although the mastermind had been deliberately mysterious for a reason, judging from the current situation, they were an ally rather than an enemy, and their goal was the same.
That greatly increased the odds that they were a living person.
And if they were alive, they could not simply vanish into thin air,